Stateside s conversation with Steve Girbach and Jackson Smith
Wishing you could just go to a concert, listen to your favorite local bands, and relax on a Saturday night? There’s a new weekly radio show, coming to you from the Beaver Island airwaves, that might just meet your Michigan music needs during this socially distanced time. Out in the middle of Lake Michigan, between the Lower and Upper Peninsulas, a new low-watt radio program called
Songs from the Trail is broadcasting on WVBI 100.1 FM. And it’s all about Michigan-centric music.
Musicians
Steve Girbach and
Jackson Smith are co-hosts for the new program. Girbach, who lives in Manchester and also has a house on Beaver Island, is normally deep in the live music world. He runs his own venue in Manchester and is part of the technical crew at The Ark in Ann Arbor. But since the COVID-19 crisis brought in-person events to a halt, Girbach says he’s been missing live concerts.
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Water quality and conservation practices around Michigan reach both its Lower and Upper Peninsulas, and two local waterkeepers say vigilant monitoring of these watersheds is vital.
The rural Grand Traverse Bay, at the northern end of the Lower Peninsula, is a tourist and retirement hotspot. Heather Smith, Grand Traverse Baykeeper, said this has led to more development, which results in loss of wetlands, vegetation, and the natural shoreline tree canopy.
She said she works to stop those impacts. If we don t pay attention to wetland loss now, or if we don t think about preserving our tree canopy, it s going to be too late, said Smith. And it s so hard to revert back. Preservation is so much more effective than restoration.
Waterkeeper Groups Work to Preserve MI Fresh Waters publicnewsservice.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from publicnewsservice.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
On the eve of the fourth anniversary of the shooting at a Quebec City mosque that left six worshippers dead,
Ricochet contributor Sanaa Ali-Mohammedexplores the “systemic, institutional, and societal forms of exclusion (that) remain a daily reality for many Canadian Muslims.” This is partly due to lack of public funding for “anti-Islamophobia work led by the people and civil-society groups who understand the issue and experience it most severely,” she says.
According to her research, “in 2019, the Department of Canadian Heritage, through its Community Support, Multiculturalism, and Anti-Racism Initiatives program, allocated just 3.7 per cent of $21 million in funding to Muslim-led and -serving organizations,” with just two per cent to “organizations meaningfully led by hijab-wearing Muslim women, 0.4 per cent to organizations led by Black Muslims, and one per cent to first-time Muslim recipients of federal funding.”
50 wonderful reasons to rediscover America – one for every state
We ve found an American adventure for everyone to mark the changing of the guard in Washington DC
America is full of epic trips
Credit: Getty
And so America has entered a new moment. After months of uncertainty and several weeks of (how shall we put it?) turbulence, a page has been turned, a fresh chapter begun.
Will the USA’s politics be less abrasive as a result of this changing of the guard? Perhaps. Will it be suddenly more attractive as a destination? No, not exactly. Because, while the events of recent history: the fractious discourse, the riot in Washington DC, the government by social media, have not painted the nation in the most appealing light, it takes a lot to dim the lustre of a country that, in terms of holidays, is an epic playground.